Greetings and salutations, kind sirs, for today you are looking at the newest build of Android and Me. While we’re in no way finished, we figured now would be a good time to roll out some of the changes we’ve been working on.

What’s changed, you ask? Lots of stuff.

Most exciting, we’ve taken our first steps towards deploying our user rating system. Now anyone with an Android and Me account can rack up points for leaving comments (and score extra points when other users up-vote your content). Along with the point system, you’ll find a user widget in the top right sidebar (when logged in) that displays your avatar, point total, last login, recently viewed articles and your most recent comments. We’ll be greatly expanding the user profile options in the next few weeks, but we wanted to go ahead and start letting you guys earn some points while we build out the rest of the system.

While the main masthead for the site remains mostly unchanged for now, we’ve added a bit of spice to hold us over to the next iteration. In an effort to make the entire section more timely, the popular posts now have a relative time stamp and the secondary navigation has been replaced with a list of trending tags. For now, these trending tags are built solely on our own content, but in the future I hope to plug these into the pulse of the internet.

In the sidebar, we’ve got new Hotly debated and Top commenters widgets. Hotly debated, as before, will show you the posts with the most comments in the past few weeks. Top commenters will highlight specific users from the past 5 days whose comments received the most up-votes. Moving forward, we’re going to try to feature more user content on the site. Posting solid comments and racking up a high score will soon come with perks.

When viewing a single entry, you’ll be followed by our new social buttons. We ditched the ShareThisAddAnythingEtc plugins and went 3rd party official buttons only. We think they’ll lead to more accurate counts and we encourage you to use them as much as your fellow social users can stand.

We’ve also built a new type of editorial post, which we’re calling the hero post, that should make its debut here any day now. You’ll know it when you see it; hero posts are full width and will center around an editorial illustration or typesetting from @angiedoes. We’ll use hero posts to draw attention to any content worth a daily feature.

We’ll also be bringing back our newsletter. Thousands of you have subscribed and we haven’t sent a thing in months. That’s changing. We’ll be back to our old trick of giving away prizes just for opening mail, so sign up while we’re still being lazy.

I also wanted to take this moment to thank the team that’s been working with me. This has been one of the most fun builds I’ve ever been a part of and everyone has played a huge role. Angie not only did most of the design here, she’s actually been in the CSS making edits. I’ve also been working (in my home, no less) with a new developer, Joseph, who you can now find listed in the sidebar. We’ve also taken on a slew of new authors in the past few months, and the Android and Me family is as tight as it’s ever been. And even though Taylor is officially out of the picture, we all still owe him a huge debt for all he’s done and is doing here.

Along with my staff I need to thank you, the loyal reader, for making all this possible. We keep growing because you guys keep showing up each day (for some reason). I speak for the entire Android and Me family when I say:

Thank you. We genuinely appreciate it.

Clark is a developer living in Austin, Texas. He runs ClarkLab, a small web firm with his wife, Angie. He's a big fan of usability, standards, and clean design.

Most Tweeted This Week

So slick! So nice! I love it! You and Angie have outdone yourselves :D

http://www.youtube.com/emogamer Christopher Chavez

Woah! Just noticed the comments! LOL Awesome! xD

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

Voting up someone’s comment is so much more awesome now that it ‘sticks’ to the person’s account.

http://www.youtube.com/emogamer Christopher Chavez

Holy poopsicles! Better watch what I post now o_O

http://www.anthonydomanico.com Anthony Domanico

Yes, you’d better! ;)

Angie Strickland

Thanks Chris! Can’t wait until it’s all out :)

SliestDragon

Nice little update. Cool to see the site get more and more polished with every update. Nice job Clark. :)

noriega713

Looks sort of like the new Android market to me :-) …or I have bad eyes. Either way looks great!

http://sweeterskins.net Lemon

Comments look lovely! :)

Richard Yarrell

Hat’s off to the crew, This is hands down is a great design. Androidandme is definately TOPS..

Dustin Earley

Everyone’s so… nice. *tear*

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

I’m noticing their might be a bug in the up-votes being permanently transferred to the user account. It might be a cache issue (as it appears to be working on the staging server). Investigating…

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

Derp! I take it back, it appears to be working. I think they are just a bit behind, due to cache. We’ll look at adding an exception so you guys can rage in real time.

Dustin Earley

Finally, real time rage.

fatspirit

Voting arrows can sometimes overlap with username, at least in mobile version of the site.

mikedminor

Nice update. Seems to be faster on my moble browsers.

spookz

It looks like Android and Me is getting ready for some Ice Cream Sandwich :D

Sturoid

What’s with the huge fonts? I see a few sites are taking this approach. I think the smaller fonts look a bit more professional and not child like.

YNWA

What you mean we finally have a way of blocking stupid iphone commenters? Hopefully this cuts down on it.

http://www.anthonydomanico.com Anthony Domanico

I’m sure that will still be us painstakingly going through the comments on a regular basis. :(

YNWA

Once this new comments system is more established just make it so first time commenters have to be manually approved, then start blocking the flamers. Voila. Problem solved.

If you need people to help sort through the comments, you can alway recruit volunteers! I am up for it, and I’m sure plenty more would be too!

Tito!

I see. Kudos to Angie! :)
I’m both excited & congratulating her on leading this “hero post”

The Designing of this site always intrigued me to make my own personal blog.
especially with the renovation of the mobile site.
Perhaps one of the Best!

Angie Strickland

Very cool, thank you!

FEEDBACK

REPLY COMMENTS SHOULD HAVE A SLIGHTLY GREY BACKGROUND. Its hard to read right now.

http://www.androidnews.de/ Frank | androidnews

One little problem I noticed is that the “Like” button in the left siderbar gets cut when accessing the site from germany. This is due to the problem that “Like” means “GefÃ¤llt mir” in German, leading the button’s width to be neccessarily higher. See this Screenshot to know what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/TFnAO.png
AFAIk you can just set the button to say “Like” in all languages. Problem solved. :)

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

Good catch! I’ll look into forcing the word ‘like’ into all FB buttons.

Mr Guzz

It Look Great…..keep the good work !

Tiuri

Very nice. Love the changes to far!

http://Varemenos.com Varemenos

If you need for web design you can email me. For a sample of my work check my website.

http://dylandersen.me/ Dylan Andersen

Awesome job dude. The hard work is seeping out of every crevice. A+

loki060706

Like the new page. Keep up the good work and keep the Android news flowing.

AceoStar

Love it

SphericalPuma

Dear Androidandme,

Awesome.

Signed,

Me

tryptech

Nice to see design cues taken from engadget/joystiq XD. But seriously, the clean, minimal look fits with the design direction of Android itself so it fits well.

Prince77

Is the Android and Me widget back up and running??

http://www.anthonydomanico.com Anthony Domanico

In theory we will have an awesome new mobile app coming out in the next few months that will make the widget feel like…ahem… “!@$@ing windows 98″

http://whysoangrybirds.com mikeyDroid

The site as a whole feels cleaner – typography, widgets, etc.

Font size a tad large in the article but that’s just preference.

Now where’s my Bionic news? :D <3

http://whysoangrybirds.com mikeyDroid

Ohh, I’d love to be able to edit a post (we can’t as of now, can we?), in case I leave something out, or.. you know, when I forget to form complete sentences…

http://htcsource.com Nick Gray

Great work guys. For a while I was thinking that the changes were never going to roll out. I’m going to need to keep my HTC Syatus comments in check since I seem to get downvoted every time I mention that phone. :)

droiddewd

I can’t see the vote buttons oddly ehough but I’m guessing is due to having an outdated IE browser here at work. Before the update I could see them :O( though the overall layout on the site is very smooth. :O)

http://www.clapfootgames.com Mark Ng

Nice redesign

OnIn2

Nice design. The new voting system should help with the trolls

http://www.anthonydomanico.com Anthony Domanico

That’s what we’re hoping for :)

http://www.devolute.net devolute

I’ve always liked the appearance of this site. I think this is a more of the same, which is good. I still wish you used Disqus instead I guess, but I suppose you want to encourage people to use the forums and comments.

Chris

It looks like the old site just more green.

B2L

Looks awesome! Now we can see how many hundreds of down ranks Richard gets.

http://daveysmind.tumblr.com iDavey

Ah, this is very slick. Even the mobile commenting system is very well done. Kudos to the team and can’t wait to see the future additions.

One question, how can you add a picture to your profile?

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

The avatars are automatically sourced from gravatar.com based on your user email. Gravatar is a universal avatar system. Signing up takes a few seconds and afterwards you’ll start seeing your picture show up on lots of websites.

http://daveysmind.tumblr.com iDavey

And I thank you very much Mr. Wimberly.

Are you on G+? I was following the blog until the untimely demise. You’d make a great addition to Tech Enthusiast circe.

I like the new improvements. I have one request tho. Can we get the option to choose our own password? That password you sent me is hard to remember.

http://www.lament.us lament

Click “Edit Profile” under your name, and change your password down at the bottom.

http://whysoangrybirds.com mikeyDroid

You should be able to hit “forgot password” when logging in. Enter your email, and it’ll send you a link to reset it, and enter what you want.

http://www.lament.us lament

Nice work, Clark and Angie!

Going to try out the mobile site now.

BiGMERF

keep up the good work guys !! this place is like crack to me… I have to have my fix allday

Scotter

Clean. Love it!

DeRocKK

Totally digging the new design!

Garar

A little off topic but I love how there are 36 +1′s and no Likes for this article!

http://twitter.com/mswansonxi SparkyXI

Not OT at all. I think everyone here would rather post this via G+ and let the fb rot. Am I wrong, people? :D

aj

The new changes caught me by surprise. I visited the website and the page looked like it used to then i looked at previous post the BAMMM!!!! It looked all different and new and shiny and bigger font too. I like it keep it up guys

BiGMERF

Will not let me log into gravatar.com.. i enter the same info from here to sign in there. email/pass, but it keeps saying it does not exists.. SMH guess I will be avatarless. :(

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

MERF, you only use the same email. Gravatar has it’s own account system. All you’ve gotta do is sign up there and add the email you’ve used here (Gravatar lets you add lots of email addresses in case you use lots of different emails and blogs).

Eric Rossman

Great look to the site. I like the new rating system. Keep up the great work!

http://twitter.com/mswansonxi SparkyXI

Congrats on a job well done. Now all AaM needs is a super-awesome podcast. Game, Set, Match.

BiGMERF

Thank Clark…. I think I got it done.. Lets see if it works now

BiGMERF

Looks like it did.. :). Thanks again

http://mi-manzanita.tumblr.com Alex

How exactly do I change my profile picture?

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

The avatars are automatically sourced from gravatar.com based on your user email. Gravatar is a universal avatar system. Signing up takes a few seconds and afterwards you’ll start seeing your picture show up on lots of websites.

A few people have asked. I’ll post a guide/help to make that a bit more clear in the future.

http://mi-manzanita.tumblr.com Alex

ok thanks :)

http://mi-manzanita.tumblr.com Alex

I got it to work :D

http://gplus.to/DrJeckyl Dr.Jeckyl

Impressive as always Angie and Clark.

M

looks real slick!

http://htcsource.com Nick Gray

So…. what happens when all of us have commented a few thousand times? Does the little Android box next to our avatar just grow with the numbers?

http://clarklab.net Clark Wimberly

We’ll probably drop the little Android once people know what the point totals are. (Originally the point total was just in a box connected to the avatar as one shape)

SliestDragon

I was wondering the same thing. Also remember that some people still have a few hundred comments from the old forum that they’ve racked up. :p

http://htcsource.com Nick Gray

Not sure if you’re gonna see this, but how do the points work. It seems like I get two points for every comment I post. Any plans on comment reply notifications? If we had that in place, I’d know for sure that you read this comment reply.

Uncemister

Its official. This site is now made of win.

tehsusenoh

It looks great! The font is like old man sized though. A bit smaller would be wonderful.

Angie Strickland

You can always CTRL – and get a “young’un” view of the site ;) I really wanted to make things super legible, and try to take advantage of all the space we have.

elijahblake

loving the new site.. Good work!!

andrew

Sooooooo this is fine and dandy however, when are you guys coming out with a native application? The widget is kinda pointless…or atleast a nice scrollable widget would even be a welcomed upgrade

BiGMERF

Can we get an edit option .. ?

http://www.netshelter.com Brandon Friesen

Love the new design. Congrats to Clark and team!

Silgrond

I love the design, but the font size of the mobile version is so small, that my eyes are burning, and I’ll be blind soon. I can’t even “increase” or zoom in the mobile site.

Can you please do something with it? :)
(I have already mentioned this on twitter around a month ago or so)

kodinos

Well done for the redesigning of the website!

However, I would suggest to use smaller fonts…gosh they are huge now and we need more scrolling to read what we would read before in the same real estate!

Anyway, just a though… :)

sylar

Nice I like it but for some reason it makes my browser slow down. Any ideas on that I’m using the latest release of chrome and that might have something to do with it. Still looks really slick.

sylar

Also how about an option to edit our posts if we misspelled or stated something incorrectly.

pokemontrainer4life

Not sure if it was like this with the old site, but I just noticed when you highlight text, it’s in Android Green. <3

dVyper

Looks alright but I’m still hating the headers in that with me on a laptop screen, even for this very article I have to scroll down before I can read any actual text. I hate having to scroll before I can read the stuff I actually came here to read!

Stella

I love the updates. The site looks cleans and loads fast in my mobile browser, too.